Dead Boy Detectives review: A fun supernatural YA romp

The Dead Boy Detectives are a cult favorite that never quite found a cult. Introduced in the pages of Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman, the undeniable strength of the premise — a ghost boy from the 1910s is best friends with a ghost boy from the 1990s; they solve ghost mysteries! — regularly lures in comics creators, but rarely for longer than a single story arc every five to 10 years.

But in Netflix’s new Dead Boy Detectives TV series, the strange world of Edwin Paine and Charles Rowland bursts with surrealist creativity, keeps itself squarely on the rails of the supernatural detective genre, and wraps the tension between those two poles around a chewy coming-of-age core.

Even this old-school DBD fan has to admit: Netflix’s version of the Dead Boy Detectives might be the best they’ve ever been.

Netflix’s Dead Boy Detectives are the late Edwin (George Rexstrew) and Charles (Jayden Revri), who run a supernatural detective agency where they solve the mysteries of ghosts, demons, and everything else that goes bump in the night. The boys team up with the enigmatic and amnesiatic Crystal (Kassius Nelson) after exorcizing a demon from her, and, following the trail of a missing child, the trio finds themselves trapped in a small Pacific Northwest town brimming with supernatural conundrums. From there, they cross paths with a whole host of strange beings, including (but not limited to) a Cat King, an immortal witch, and a bored goth lady running a butcher shop. All the while, Edwin and Charles must evade the Night Nurse (Ruth Connell), the immortal being tasked with rounding up the lost souls of dead children and making sure they’re all in their designated afterlives.

Barring some tweaks to fit the show’s original pitch as a Doom Patrol spinoff, fans of the Dead Boy Detectives comics will happily observe that this is all very familiar (not that there’s exactly a surfeit of Dead Boy Detectives comic fans). But showrunners Steve Yockey (Supernatural, Doom Patrol) and Beth Schwartz (Legends of Tomorrow, Sweet Tooth) cannily insert two major changes to Charles and Edwin that make a world of difference in the show.

First, the dead boys are now dead teens, solidly in the 16-18 range, rather than the precocious tweens pretending at adult responsibilities they’ve been up until now. This opens the tonal possibilities of the show far wider than in the comics, to staples of the supernatural mystery genre that 12-year-olds are simply not equipped to face, like ax murderers. And now that the Dead Boy Detectives have hit puberty, Yockey and Schwartz also lead them into the wide, compelling world of teenage melodrama, which brings us to their next smart change: queer pining, baby!

Photo: Ed Araquel/Netflix

Queer reads of Edwin Paine, the buttoned-up boy so isolated that no one noticed that his bullies had murdered him, have never been a big stretch. The most recent Dead Boy Detectives comic, written by Pornsak Pichetshote and drawn by Jeff Stokely, even took overt steps in that direction, albeit in a quiet and label-less way befitting the preteen age of their protagonists. But Yockey and Schwartz have a teenage Edwin, and they practically bombard him with cute boys — a joyfully silly, compellingly dramatic, earnestly heartfelt, and utterly weird coming-out story.

Silly, dramatic, heartfelt, and weird are good descriptions of the show’s greatest assets. Early episodes of the season can feel a little overloaded with twee expository rules (ghosts can travel through mirrors and cat scratches hurt them; there’s a real magic shop in this otherwise normal town, and the proprietor is a walrus cursed to have human form) but the show makes up for it in a refreshing internal consistency. The rules of the setting are never introduced without a later scene that uses them to twist the plot or raise the stakes.

Those stakes are high, and there are some dark and terrifying moments that are treated with the necessary gravitas. But at the same time, Dead Boy Detectives finds all the fun the concept deserves — because the concept of a pair of teenage ghost besties solving ghost crimes with a pair of teenage psychics is just a good time.

The reason Edwin in particular is trapped in Port Townsend, for instance, is because he pissed off the Cat King, a cute boy who dooms him to count every single cat in town because neither of them can be normal about a possible attraction between them. (How very catlike to latch on to a crush and decide the way to express affection is by being harmlessly malevolent.) The actors are all 100% committed to their characters. The setting is creative and well staged. The costumes don’t make any sense (seriously, how do two runaway teenage girls have such perfectly styled wardrobes?), but they do look amazing. It’s a fun coming-of-age romp first, and a serious supernatural mystery second.

Image: Netflix

Yockey and Schwartz balance these tones deftly. There might be some ridiculous moments, like a couple foul-mouthed dandelion spirits who live in a jar and are only silenced by a sweater being tossed on them, but it’s never a joke in-universe. There’s no wry, cynically genre-savvy comment about the more over-the-top elements. Instead, they’re embraced, even by the characters who are newer to the whole supernatural schtick than others. But they’re not taken so seriously as to undermine the sheer joy of fantasy that a whole paranormal world of ghosts, demons, witches, and Cat Kings has to offer.

Each case is isolated to a specific paranormal mystery, solved within the episode’s run time, but there are lingering mysteries that gradually build up in the background. This is a fundamental building block of episodic television, but Netflix productions too often overstuff TV shows with drawn-out serialized plots that end up draining any interest. DBD’s procedural structure keeps the world-building funky and fresh. We constantly see new weird happenings and piece together another exciting mystery with the boys. But at the same time, the gradual escalation of the background plots (the boys avoiding forces that would force them to move on to their afterlives, Crystal’s whole schtick, a wonderfully melodramatic child-stealing witch) weave together nicely, augmented by everything else we learn about the world.

Dead Boy Detectives isn’t just a great surprise for fans of the original comics; it should be a pleasant surprise to anyone looking for a great paranormal YA TV series. In a genre crowded with contenders — Netflix’s Chilling Adventures of Sabrina and Fate: The Winx Saga among them — the new series stands out as a shining gem.

Dead Boy Detectives is now streaming on Netflix.